HSQG · Higher Spin Quantum Gravity: Lagrangian Formulations for Higher Spin Gravity and Their Applications
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-12-01 → 2022-11-30
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Higher Spin Quantum Gravity: Lagrangian Formulations for Higher Spin Gravity and Their Applications
The problem The Action "Higher Spin Quantum Gravity: Lagrangian Formulations for Higher Spin Gravity and Their Applications" is looking into the Lagrangian formulation for higher-spin (HS) gravity, one of the long-standing questions in research on Quantum Gravity. In a particular setup, known as the holographic duality (aka AdS/CFT duality), the "simplest" possible candidate for quantum gravity is the holographic dual of the free conformal field theory, the simplest CFT. There, Quantum Gravity is described by a theory that contains an infinite tower of massless HS fields. It is known as HS Gravity or Vasiliev theory. Remarkably, this theory is hard to describe even classically: the main obstacle to understanding this theory at the quantum level is the absence of the classical Lagrangian. Finding this classical Lagrangian formulation would be an important milestone toward establishing a theory of Quantum Gravity. Why is it important for society? The problem under consideration is completely theoretical and has no ambition of a direct impact on general society. However, the research in this direction invites attention for several reasons. Apart from being a problem that interests a large number of specialists and non-experts, it is also one of the leading directions where new mathematical methods are introduced in physics, guided by only the consistency of the framework, without further need for experimental verifications. The results reported during the project may potentially lead to applications also in other areas of theoretical and experimental physics, e.g., related to monopoles (hypothetical particles carrying magnetic charge). What are the overall objectives? The overall objective of the action is to achieve a Lagrangian formulation for HS Gravity - a long-standing problem in theoretical physics. It also has an objective of professional development of the individual researcher (K.M.).
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The research proposed here is principally aimed at deriving action for higher-spin (HS) gravity theories, to quartic order in fields, mainly focused in dimensions three, four and five, by using Noether method, adapted to HS systems. We will find out what are the conditions for the action for HS gravity to exist and what spectrum is allowed, what are the locality properties of such theories and what is the role of special dimensions. We will further explicate the role of the cosmological constant and parity odd structures in such theories. In particular, we will study the zoo of five dimensional HS algebras and their role in formulations of different HS gravity theories in five and lower dimensions. The result of this research will be the answer to long-standing questions of existence and uniqueness of action formulation for field theories with massless HS spectrum. The obtained information will have wide applications in Quantum Gravity. In particular, the knowledge of the action to quartic order in fields will allow us to compute the one-loop mass renormalization of HS fields and compare to known results in the conjectured dual CFT, thus providing a non-trivial check for the AdS/CFT conjecture.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE · LondonCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union